R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Critics and Criticism in the 'Seventies 209which took shape on the very eve of the 'seventies needsspecial mention. On the 9th of October, 1869, appearedthe first number of The Academy, 'a monthly record ofLiterature, Learning, Science, and Art'. The Athenaeum,the chief existing journal devoted entirely to the humanities,represented general literary culture, and its reviewsof books were anonymous. The Academy, as its nameimplies, was to have a closer connection with academicscholarship, and its articles were to be signed. Its firstnumber contained an imposing list of contributors; inliterature Matthew Arnold, in aesthetics Sidney Colvin,in theology Lightfoot and Cheyne, in science Huxley andLubbock, in classical scholarship Mark Pattison, Conington,and Robinson Ellis. But the magazine, started undersuch brilliant auspices, had a chequered career and finally,after a transformation in which nothing but the name wasretained, it died suddenly on the 11th of September, 1915,one of the victims of the World War.But in the 'seventies no one dreamt of the iron timeto come. I was myself a schoolboy, and my first acquaintancewith the works of the writers who figure in thissurvey was either in my salad days at Clifton or inthe next decade at Oxford. They are thus to me as oldfamily friends, and if this gives anything of a bias to myjudgment, I can at least claim to speak from longfamiliarity and early appreciation. Some, no doubt,would have preferred the verdicts of un jeune feroce'defaming and defacing'. But I venture to think thata decade that has to its credit Pater's Renaissance', thebest critical work of R. H. Hutton, Stopford Brooke,Leslie Stephen and Edward Dowden, and MatthewArnold's Wordsworth; and which saw the birth of theNew Shakspere Society and the 'English Men of LettersSeries', will be able to hold up its head and look anyfuture in the face.B 14